Perch @perchingpath@eldritch.cafe

Gayfeather, colic-root, rattlesnake-master, blazing star,( devil's bite, Cahaba torch, prairie-pine,) I took your list to that fireworks store in Upland, gathered & checked off each rocket, then imagined how you'd stare at a forest fire (guilty? gleeful?) as I put them all back.

Until quite recently I harbored an intractable unvoiced doubt as to whether lust was really something that could be felt bodily. I half-believed that was solely a social gloss to avoid thinking too hard about affection, power, & loneliness.

Main Line people only think it's dangerous over here because neighborhoods getting less white feels like a threat to them.
Sure, our town cops hounded a schizophrenic man for days then engineered a confrontation to cast murdering him as self-defense, but that'll happen anywhere.

The glare through St. Louis Lambert's glass walls will set us off again and she'll be inconsolable, trailing blind & weepy after the whir of my suitcase wheels while we look for our connection gate.

This portion of insomnia is tense, numbed, & paralyzed, like waiting in an airport. Not alone, which can be nice when it's not obligation that's sent you traveling, but with a fragile child. How long will she be occupied by her crosswords? What here is safest to feed her?

The iterative declassification of French nuclear test records will eventually reveal a tiny bomb was set off under my bed while I was out.

A portable blacklight may be used when picking herbs in the dark, to avoid the taking on of passengers.

I walked north into a neighborhood I'd been avoiding. The pareidolic faces that appear on the side walls of their defunct bars are uncommonly poignant.

One comfort of fall can be living in an aftermath untethered from any specific catastrophe.

A slowish night by headcount, with a few too many cops & "scary clowns". A child lost their mustache in the leaves.
But the clouds were racing and the wooden chimes were rattling over distant shrieks and just as we hit midnight the cold blew in all at once.

Partway through rubbing off a mouth of navy lipstick, a mess like you'd caught me in the embrace of a Smith Corona Four just as they'd slipped me the ribbon.

My favorite maple, four days apart. I was worried its leaves would fall green & early after our bone-dry August & September, but it's held to its festive schedule.

Hanging a single tropical leaf above my pillow to fool myself into thinking I'm a racket-tailed roller when I wake. Come morning I expect I'll be halfway through a cricket breakfast & shocked to find I have teeth.

🞅/△

Albuterol suffuses me with energy & skittering terror and I've been using it every day since the ragweed kicked off end of last week. Deluxe apocalypse feelings.

Watched a raucous murmuration of starlings descend on an oak to tear its squirrels' nests to shreds, sprays of leaves & twigs exploding from points around the tree as the mob circulated.
http://www.perchingpath.com/scratch/twitter/201910/starlings.ogg

Your skin shining as you're conducted to the Night Conservatory by swaddled, goggled ushers.

Choosing to use a location as your memory palace is choosing to haunt it. Whatever's left of my grandmother's house in Yonkers is haunted by echoes of her & by paintings whose dates & titles I needed for an exam seventeen years ago. The Haunted Mansion is packed to the walls.

At 17 I wore one of those perfumes that attempts to evoke thunderstorms via cod-petrichor & a hint of ozone, but it actually had the exact pleasant but mundane scent of a specific drizzling afternoon moment of October 9th 2019 as inhaled through a histamine-throttled nose.

Found a feral scroll. I peered in from the end and what runes I could decipher indicated that it was a desirable egg-laying venue and I should put it back.

Late 200X in my library office with the door locked, listening to this with my forehead leant against the window, staring disconsolately at snow falling on Squirrel Hill roofs. David Sylvian briefly contextualizing my decaying corpse into picturesqueness.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sKWFmPgKV0